Chapter Seven
Lance's eyes fluttered open, and he squinted at the early morning light cascading into the room. He could hear Ash on her phone in the living room or kitchen, and confusedly heaved himself up into a sitting position, as his mind grinded from sleep to consciousness. Ash would normally have been off to work around that time (and she would've woken him up before she left); but then it struck him that it was Ash's day off, which also meant that today was the day. The day of the fundraiser.
Lance, ever the stoic, was secretly dreading being paraded around that theater (or wherever this was taking place) like Il Duce at the end of the war. He abhorred meeting new people, and especially under pre-contrived contexts and pretenses. The only reason he didn't hate going up on stage to perform was because he was in control of the situation–but at this party, or fundraiser or whatever, he would have to play it totally flywheel loose, without a safety net. While he considered himself a great student of laconicism, Lance felt the worst part of it was that he couldn't even complain to Ash about it, considering she was even more nervous over the party than he. But she could tell he wasn't looking forward to it.
The porcupine fell back onto his side, looking at Ash's empty side of the bed. When it came to situations like this, when it all came down to his ability to react in a social situation, Lance would reconnoiter and gather as much information he could. He'd been surreptitiously needling his girlfriend for details about the big night since he found out he'd have to go. Knowing him so well, she caught on to what he was doing and tried her best to make him feel more comfortable with going to the party, but had limited information about it herself.
From what Lance could gather, the little soiree would revolve around a group of affluent appreciators of the fine arts brought in to see if they'd want to help fund any number of shows and functions that the theater would be putting on. The entire thing was organized by someone named 'Nana Noodleman' (who, as far as Lance could judge by the name, was either a Jewish grandmother or a twentieth century Dadaist). So as not to make appear to be the tactless exhibition in cash-grabbing that it was, the higher ups of the theater were trying to build it up into a big event, with everyone even marginally involved in the theater coming dressed up to chat with the would-be benefactors.
According to what Ash had vented to him last night (and hinted toward during the days preceding), most of the people at the party wouldn't be terribly happy that he'd show up. But this didn't bother him, too much; most of Lance's life was showing up at places where no one wanted him. The majority of people who felt this way were the ones Ash had gotten close to around the time of the concert, and not the assortment of benefactors Nana was bringing in (who had, probably, little to no interaction with the theater group). This presented to Lance a dichotomy which he could exploit to his advantage. Nana's high rollers were in the position of power–and it was Buster and his friends' responsibility to please them if the Moon Theater were to prosper. If no one (or only a few people) knew he was coming to the party, Lance could ingratiate himself with these wealthy individuals before anyone had caught on he was even there, then he could factionalize them against the others. If this succeeded, the paradigm would be turned on it's head, and it would be the theater Ash's friends job to placate Lance and his new rich allies–as opposed to Lance having to grovel before Buster and his group.
Of course, in all probability, this would only make Ash's friends dislike him more once they realized what he as doing ( if they realized; Lance wasn't yet entirely convinced these were the brightest people). There was always the slim chance they might take a shine to him if he used his superb powers of manipulation to convince Nana's people to help out the theater, but his duplicity would probably override that in their minds. If he had any hope of keeping Ash happy, he'd have to make her friends like him (like he promised he would), but that could be done any time after the party, when they weren't all in one big group. But right now, his only thoughts were on surviving the day.
After tossing the rudiments of his plan around in his head a few more times, Lance forced himself out of bed and slipped on his rank tee shirt. He walked out of the bedroom and into the living room, greeted by the smell of Ash cooking and the sound of her still on the phone. He hopped up onto the couch and fished the remote out from between two cushions.
"Ash, get me a pepsi," he called toward the kitchen, flicking on the television and immediately changing the channel to cartoons. A few seconds later Ash appeared next to him, handing him a soda and rubbing his shoulder. He silently mouths 'Thanks, baby,' and pops it open while someone on the other end of Ash's call mutters diffidently.
"I don't know, Meena. It doesn't sound anything like him, to do that," Ash replied, walking back to the kitchen. "No, I haven't spoken to Johnny in days," she said, after a short pause, and Lance's ears pricked up. "Are you sure he knows that you just want to go with him to this thing as a friend?" Ash was getting progressively quieter as she walked out of earshot. "That is why you want to go with him, right?" was the last thing Lance could make out before her voice was ultimately taken over by the sizzling of eggs and blaring of the television. His attention quickly shifted back to the cartoon and his own thoughts.
There were no foreseeable obstacles to his plans for the evening. Lance knew that it was easy for people to hate him; while he was famous among his classmates for his juvenile antics, he was one of the most despised people in his high school. Whatever trait of his that led to this revilement (he knew he was disliked, he just never understood why) seemed to have followed him into his life as a young adult. But he could be very charming when we tried, and older people seemed to enjoy his company much more than his peers; so there was a good chance he could win over Nana's people (assuming they were older, and he did).
The biggest issues would arise later, and were totally unknowable. Lance's actions at the fundraiser could generate any number of reactions among Ash and her 'new family' and each individual person's reaction would be altered by someone else's and this, theoretically, would snowball into such a number of contingencies that it would be deterministically impossible for Lance to plan for each and every one. Not to mention that Ash was the only person Lance actually knew in this scenario.
For a fraction of a second, Lance felt like he was having a panic attack and wanted to break down in tears, but these sensations vanished as quickly as they appeared.
"Breakfast, baby," chimed Ash, swaying into the living room with two plates of assorted morning comestibles, all piping hot. Lance put down his soda and grabbed his plate, cutlery and all, and waited while Ash carefully climbed up next to him on the couch. "When are you going to take your shower, sweetness?" she asked, slicing into a miniature link of breakfast sausage with the side of her fork. Lance had already started wolfing down his own meal.
"It's supposed to rain tonight, isn't it?" Lance replied, wiping dripping egg yolk from his mouth.
" Ha ha, Lance. Maybe you should give up music and go into comedy," said Ash sardonically, but playful.
"Yeah, I could be Louie Anderson's side kick," Lance scratched his neck, and Ash smirked. She knew what he'd ask next. "Why isn't Life with Louie syndicated anymore?" he asked, and Ash's smirk graduated to an amused smile. Besides music, Lance entertained any number of obsessions (most of them bizarre and some bordering on the unhealthy) and the rotund eighties comedian Louie Anderson was one of them.
"Because it's over twenty years old, Lance–and you aren't even twenty," Ash interjected. It was a rhetorical question, but she always took the opportunity to tease, or provoke, her boyfriend. "And Louie Anderson is, like, eighty years old-"
"He's not eighty! He sixty-three, and you know it," Lance shoved a forkful of sausage in his mouth, feigning anger at his giggling girlfriend. He swallowed hard and gave the nasally squeal that signaled he was about to do his Louie impression, " Ughnnn! Don't laugh at me!"
"Wh-why Lou-" Ash laughed. "Why Louie Anderson? There are a hundred more contemporary comedians who you could obsess over, but you choose this sixty-year-old, overweight-"
"Ughnnn!" Lance squealed.
"I-is it, is-" Ash began, giggling a little more intensely.
"Ughnnn!" Lance squealed harder, then broke into suppressed chuckling at his own absurdity. Ash was laughing too hard to enquire any further. After a couple minutes of residual chuckling and Lance's short, aberrant Louie squeals they were nearly finished eating breakfast.
"What are you going to wear to the party, baby?" asked Ash, noting a slight change in Lance's demeanor at the question.
"Well, it's going to be a kind of, uh, upscale deal, right? I'll just wear what I always do," he answered, picking through the remnants of his meal. He was referring to a set of clothes he kept for semi-formal occasions, which satisfied the fundamental requirements of the dress code while still making him look like a freak who just came out from under a bridge. It consisted of a white short sleeve dress shirt, black trousers, a red tartan necktie and a pair of python boots that belonged to his father.
"Oh no, baby–come on. This is an important night for the theater, and that stuff looks horrible," Ash adored Lance's eccentricities, and by extension his eccentric sense of style, but this wasn't the first time she'd made this argument. "It makes you look like a deranged NASA technician, who got fired and came back to shoot up Cape Canaveral."
"Why did I get fired?" asked Lance, trying to avoid the point Ash was making.
"Baby," she began. "We can just pop in my store at the mall and get you a pair of dress shoes-"
"I don't wanna," Lance interjected. "My boots have soul, they mean something."
Ash took Lance's plate and stacked it on top of her own, then set them on the coffee table. "Lance, they look like… If David Bowie were a cowboy-"
"What are you wearing?" he asked, leaning back and crossing his arms.
Ash crossed her own arms, saying, "This isn't about me-"
"Well, I'd rather look like a NASA cowboy than be a poseur," said Lance, holier-than-thou and with eyes closed.
Coming from anyone else, Ash would've taken that as the gravest of all insults, but she couldn't help but smile at her boyfriend and his studied obliviousness to his own absurdity. She gave him a playful shove and then carried their plates to the kitchen.
After breakfast came a little amorous petting on the couch, then the scene gradually shifted to Ash sitting on the floor and performing her daily guitar practice while Lance shirked his, preferring to lay prone and silently lament the encroaching fundraiser.
Ash had seen Lance like this multiple times, in one of his miniature depressions. He'd usually go into one of these little funks before trips to places like the dentist's office, or after a bad experience on-stage (owing to too many 'philistines' in the audience, as Lance put it). She knew he'd hate the party, even before she told him he'd have to go. It seemed to Ash that Lance had a preternatural ability to influence people and could make anyone his friend, but he considered himself to be totally socially inept, and hated personal interaction. Whenever she asked him why, he always described a nebulous, far-away feeling of not being allowed to be himself around other people. Ash was, in his words, the only person with whom Lance could be himself; this being the reason he loved her.
After years of knowing him, loving him, and sharing his pain, Ash eventually came to the conclusion that, while Lance may have been an unambitious work-shy degenerate, all he really wanted from life was to be understood. All his extensive knowledge of music, poetry, philosophy and the like was amassed in an ever-present attempt to achieve this end, or at least that's how it appeared to Ash.
Reflecting on this, and seeing him lying catatonic on the couch with his childish thousand-yard stare, Ash could understand how easy it must've been for Becky to lead Lance astray; especially considering how little attention Ash herself had been paying him in the time leading up to the incident. All it really took for Lance to be happy was to have someone willing to entertain all the outlandish notions that ran through his head, and when he doesn't have that naturally he'll go off looking for someone who will give it to him (but never really expecting to find them). So, when someone like Becky comes on the scene and even pretends to understand him, of course he'd fall head-over-heels for her.
Ash wondered how Lance must've felt about the situation concerning her friends and their opinion of him, and what would happen at the party. It must be harrowing for him, she thought, to be forced to acknowledge all these people who disliked him so much, and know that he'd have to act like someone else to even have a chance at getting on their good side. She hadn't seen him compose, or draw, or write any poetry–really, she hadn't seen him try to express himself in any way since they'd gotten back together, and that was a bad sign.
Maybe I could do something for him… To make up for it, She thought. While it always gave Ash some degree of comfort to talk to Lance about her problems, she also found it very cathartic to think about him and his issues. It gave her perspective on her own life. Everything she'd been through with Rosita the day before seemed so distant now, and silly to worry over, but Rosita's comments about birth control still lingered in her mind.
Ash had to be the responsible one in the relationship when it came to birth control. To Lance, sex was nothing more than a stress reliever, or maybe a more extreme form of cuddling. The idea that life could be produced from the act disturbed him, so he removed it from his conscious mind altogether. This extended to subjects like pregnancy and childbirth, which unsettled him and he refused to ever recognize in conversation.
From what Ash could gather, this unhealthy rejection of the fundamental aspects of motherhood (or maybe parenthood altogether) arose from a sad turn of events in his childhood. Details were scarce since he seldom spoke about it, but Ash had pieced it together over the years.
Lance was an only child, but if asked he would say that, at one time, he had a little brother. This is because, around the time he was eleven or twelve, his mother got pregnant (whether or not it was a boy was anyone's guess). Lance alluded several times to this being the event that precipitated his father abandoning them, but never gave a straight answer. Probably due to this, Lance's mother made the decision to abort the pregnancy, a bit late into it, which had a profound effect on Lance's young psyche. He wasn't willing to speak about anything concerning abortion, becoming visually perturbed if pushed. Whenever Ash was watching the news with Lance in the room and the subject of abortion came up, she'd have to change the channel. If one were to look through Lance's poems and drawings, a small amount of his work would be devoted to the imagery of wombs and fetuses–and in his more experimental arrangements, percussion and bass would sometimes be made to resemble a mother's heartbeat. Many times Ash had thought to try and talk these things through with him, and help him understand his own feelings about it, but she could never find the words.
"Hey, baby?" said Ash, getting his attention. "It's getting to be that time,"
"Yeah," he answered, not showing any real emotion.
"Wanna take your shower, now?" she asked, sweetly, and Lance dragged himself to his feet and sauntered toward the bathroom.